Using VMWARE To Evangelise

I have been telling clients and coworkers about open source for a while. Now, I SHOW them. I have a preconfigured version of Ubuntu in a virtual machine containing open source equivilants of all of the tools we use. I use these tools every day, and I willingly give anybody who asks a copy of this virtual machine to run on their own computer.

This represents a small commitment for them. They need to download the free VMWare Player, and then they can run a copy of Linux under windows without giving anything up.

My virtual machine has the full lamp stack – python, PHP, MYSql, PHPMyAdmin, and Apache. In addition, I provide NetBeans with Tomcat, a fully loaded version of Eclipse including pyDev, Aptana and PHPEclipse, and the Mono stack as well. Lastly, I provide Open Office, and a few other basic tools.

It is important to evangelise and to share both knowledge and tools.